Sources of Material to Lead to an Appreciation of Literature
Lamb, Charles and Mary: Tales from Shakespeare.
Lang, Jeanie: Stories from Shakespeare Told to the Children.
Sweetser, Kate D.: Boys and Girls from George Eliot; Boys and Girls from Thackeray; Ten Boys from Dickens.
Swinton, William, and Cathcart, George R.: Book of Tales from Fine Authors.
CHAPTER NINE
Story-Telling to Awaken an Appreciation of Music
The public school aims not only to give boys and girls a training that shall equip them with ability to gain a livelihood and provide for their material wants, but to give them resources within themselves from which to draw pleasure, broaden and deepen the emotional powers, enrich the soul by endowing it with capacity to respond to the beautiful and fine, and make them more sympathetic toward the joys and sorrows of their fellows. That is why the curriculum includes a course in music, drawing, and subjects that are branches of a great art. We do not expect to make professional musicians or painters of all the children who receive instruction, but aim to give the average child, the one who will grow to be an average, ordinary man, an appreciation of the things that give color and beauty to life and make him richer in mind and happier.
Taste is formed by what is heard in youth, and the child whose early years are associated with ragtime grows to be a devotee of ragtime, while he who hears the music of the masters becomes a man who loves great music. This is why the average European has a knowledge and love of melody that amazes Americans. He has heard good music from infancy. It is sung in the public meeting places of his town and whistled in the streets. The gamin of Naples, Rome, and Venice knows the arias from the operas as well as American children know their national anthem, and Verdi, Donizetti, and Rossini are more than names to him. He has heard their melodies from infancy, and his father or uncle or some street story-teller has familiarized him with the plots of their librettos. He knows something of the artists who sing the rôles, also, because the tailor and the barber and the baker not infrequently go to hear them, and they are a topic of conversation in the home. Here in America we have not had such opportunities. With us the opera and the symphony orchestra are exotics which only a minority has been trained to enjoy, and consequently we cannot be regarded as a musical people.